Tagmash, redux: Tim's favorite feature

Tagmash. I've redone, improved and expanded my favorite feature, tagmashing.

Introduced back in 2007, tagmashes, allow you to investigate what books satisfy two or more tags. It's a great way to find books of a clear type, but for which no single tag really works.

For example, no one has yet used the tag "vegetarian Indian cooking" and there's no Library of Congress Subject Heading for it either. But combine three tags, like vegetarian, India and cooking into the tagmash vegetarian, India, cooking and you get over 50 good matches.

Simple two-tag combination can work wonders:

biography, Kennedy music, science adventure, Alaska medieval, mystery

time travel, romance cats, humor children's, glbt Renaissance, historical fiction

Some of my favorites are off-beat: all those books about knitting for your dog and—shiver—knitting with dog hair can be found at knitting, pets. erotic, zombies is 80% Laurell K. Hamilton. And who can say no to humor, pirates? (Did you know that this Saturday is Talk like a Pirate Day? You will.)

On the serious end, fairly complex topics also work:

fiction, young adult, leukemia

France, wwii, nonfiction

You can also use - (minus) or -- (double minus) to mean "demote" or "remove" a tag. For example:

• politics, -United States Politics books, demoting books with "United States" tags
• politics, --United States Politics books, removing every book tagged "United States"

An important feature of tagmash is that it's not just a "search." Once created, tagmash pages stay there, and it enters the "swirl of relatedness." Somtimes a tag page will suggest the perfect tagmash. Other times, a tagmash will suggest an unconsidered subject.

New Feature: Tagmash overlap. I've added a new feature that, I think, brings tagmash to a new level—the tagmash overlap.

It works something like tag mirrors. Instead of showing you how you tag things, it shows how others tag your stuff. Except instead of showing you Individual tags, it finds tagmashes.

The results is, I think, a good list of topics you're interested in—topics more complex than a single tag can express. In my case, it surfaces topics like Macedonia, history, Greek, divination, Ottoman Empire, travel and erotic, poetry (!). Abby is apparently interested in adventure, surreal, English, death, love and—what a winner—evil, love.

You can find the feature from your profile statistics page. If you're signed in, this link will take you to yours.

What do you think? Comment here or come over to the New Features Talk thread.

Collections, at last

It's arrived. Members can organize their books into "collections."

The Motive. From the beginning, LibraryThing members have used the site for different things. Some used it to list only the books they own, others what they've read and a few even just the books they wanted. Meanwhile, people like me used it for everything—owned, read, lost, destroyed, wanted—using tagging as our sole way of keeping everything straight. But even tag-zealots like me had to admit there were times you wanted sharper distinctions—"buckets" or "sub-libraries"—and ways to tie those to how you connected with other members and with book recommendations. New members, whether familiar with tags or not, were regularly asking for some way to do wishlists and currently-reading lists.

The Feature. The feature, literally years in the making, gives members the ability to separate out categories of books, like "Wishlist" and "Currently reading" more definitely than could be accomplished with tags. Each collections works like a mini library and can be separately viewed, sorted and searched. Other members can see your collections, on your profile and elsewhere. Features like member-to-member connection and book recommendations react to the new system as well. (See below on integration progress.)

As we offer users new flexibility, we avoid forcing members into "our" way of thinking about books. We've provided a number of default collections—Your library, Wishlist, Currently reading, To read, Read but unowned and Favorites. Data from these collections can be aggregated across all users, and their names are even translated on LibraryThing's non-English sites. But you can also create your own collections, and remove ours. And you can ignore collections entirely, keeping everything in "Your library."

A Work in Progress. As members know, we play things pretty fast and lose here. Our motto is "beta, forevah!" But collections had to be different. Before public release we subjected it to a month of testing in our large (and non-exclusive) BETA Group. We cannot thank that group enough for all the work they did, and the passion they showed.

We hope we got most of the major bugs, but the feature is not "finished"—and this is hardly the last blog post you'll see about the feature! Most significantly, collections is now mostly a "cataloging" feature, with only limited reach to other areas of the site. Although you can specify how collections affects member connections and recommendations—so you can stop having your Wishlist or for that matter your husband's books running the social and recommendation parts of the site—implementation is basic and, in light of extraordinary collections-related load, there's a lot of caching in place. We left a few features out in order to get it the main features out now.*

We also think "unfinished" (we prefer not prematurely specified) features are the best way to engage users, and get the best for everyone. Come and contribute on Recommended Site Improvements and Bug Collectors. We also have a Announcement post in New Features.

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*We had spec'ed out a complex interaction between reading-dates and "Currently reading." But the system was probably more than most members wanted. And it certainly was taking a long time to finish, so, for now at least "Currently reading" is just a collection.

Credits: Chris (conceptDawg) headed up the project, doing most of the user interface and a majority of the back-end code. Chris and I (timspalding) designed the feature together, and I did some core back-end code. Abby (ablachly) didn't code, but she dogged us about it for years. (I'm not sure what she's going to do with herself now.) But the most important factor was the members. Members, particularly the BETA group, contributed to the effort as I've never seen it—not in any website or project, ever. Chris and I owe members an enormous amount. (I'll be blogging about this specifically soon. It needs telling.)

Top photo by radiant_guy" (Flickr, CC-SA).

Tag Mirror: See your books the way others do

UPDATE: I'm really enjoying the Talk discussion of this feature. Also, at this point it's better to talk about the feature than to use it. Everyone using it at once has the server that handles it taxed rather seriously!

A major publisher recently asked us to show them a tag cloud of their books. It took a mental flip, but only a few lines of code to adapt this for individual use.

The result is Tag Mirror, available from your and everyone's profile—here's mine (and Abby's, Altay's, Giovanni's and Casey's*). If you're signed in, here's yours. (Please note: It takes serious processing power to analyze 22 million tags. Everyone is going to hit it at once, so be patient.)

Tag Mirror "holds a mirror" up to your books and to you. Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing's twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection.** As with other tag clouds, size equals importance. When you click on a tag, you get a relevancy-ranked list of books tagged that way.

I can't decide if it's just the sort of cherry-on-top feature that makes LibraryThing unique or if it's something genuinely new and interesting. I think it might be the latter. As Altay put it, it's the sort of idea that seems obvious in retrospect.

I didn't know I was interested in gender studies.

Here's a for-example. I don't use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They're just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It's interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I'm more interested in gender studies than I thought.

More concretely, I do use the tag "alternate history," but browsing my tag mirror page called up some alternate histories that I hadn't tagged that way—useful stuff.***

Finally, Tag Mirror gives everyone a tag cloud, even those who don't bother to tag anything. It seems almost unfair.

As our recent discussion of what tagging does to knowledge brought out so well, tagging is a complex mixture of private purpose and public good. I agree with those who say that we tag best when we tag for ourselves. But when everyone does that, a rich web of meaning is created.

I've done my best to push tagging in some new directions, trying subjects and tags together statistically, making book recommendations based on tag patterns, and with the tagmash feature. You can add Tag Mirror to that list. Little things. But they keep getting more interesting.

UPDATE: It's 4:30am and, of course, I couldn't finish blogging it before someone else started a thread about it ("Just noticed this on my profile"). Come talk about it.

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*Casey has a surprising number of cookbooks! He's coming up here in a few weeks—it'll be the first time any of us have actually met him. We usually just order pizza. I think that plan's changed.
**It doesn't actually exclude your own tags. They still have an effect.
***It also brought up Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. People tag unexpectedly, if humorously.

International tags and more

We've had quite an upswing internationally, particularly among Dutch speakers. Dutch has surpassed French as our second-largest language community. (Next up: the Germans!) So I spent the evening adding some international features.

I've added special tag clouds to work pages on our non-English sites (LibraryThing.fr, LibraryThing.de, LibraryThing.nl, etc.) They show tags used by members of that site, or on books in that language.

It doesn't always "work" that well. Perhaps half the tags on our non-English sites are still in English, the site tending to appeal to English-language speakers first. But I imagine that will change as the membership broadens, and tools like this make tagging in your own language more attractive.

The example above is from the Dutch site (LibraryThing.nl) work page for Harry Mulisch's De ontdekking van de hemel (The Discovery of Heaven), the most popular work on the site. It's more than half English tags. A more Dutch example would be De kanonnen van Navarone (The guns of Navarone), tagged avontuur (journeys by airplane) and spionage (spinach) alongside thriller and world war two.*

I also added an indication of how many of your linguistic compatriots have the books. Here is the French page for Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et Tremblements (Fear and Trembling)—the fourth-most popular book among French members, but not in the first 10,000 among English-language members. The text is yellow and in English because I just added it, so no kind French user has yet volunteered a translation.

Lastly, I thought I'd announce and explain a feature just before killing it. (As Hegel said, "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."**) That feature is tag-coloring, an experiment that recently went site-wide (with the change in caching systems). The idea was to color personal tags lighter than subject tags, algorithmically at first, with some hand work from the LibraryThing for Libraries program, and then moving to let users weigh in on what was and what wasn't personal.

I was never convinced either way, but I thought it worth a try. The reaction on Talk has, however, been pretty hostile, not helped by the fact I didn't talk about it after it went live). I think I agree with the criticism now too. Anyway, chime in there if you like it. Otherwise, it's going away... Sometimes beta means making mistakes.

*Hey, it's 3:35am here.
**Underused.

Tagmash!

Tagmash: alcohol, history gets over the fact that almost nobody tags things history of alcohol

Short version: I've just gone live with a new feature called "tagmash," pages for the intersections of tags. This is a fairly obvious thing to do, but it isn't trivial in context. In getting past words or short phrases, tagmash closes some of the gap between tagging and professional subject classifications.

For example, there is no good tag for "France during WWII." Most people just don't tag that verbosely. Tagmash allows for a page combining the two: France, wwii. If you want to skip the novels, you can do france, wwii, -fiction. The results are remarkably good.

Tagmash pages are created when a user asks for the combination, but unlike a "search" they persist, and show up elsewhere. For example, the tagmash for France, Germany shows France, wwii as a partial overlap, alongside others. Related tagmashes now also show up on select tag and library subject pages, as a third system for browsing the limitless world of books.

Booooring? Go ahead and play a bit:

• Tagmash: alcohol, history
• Tagmash: dogs, humor
• Tagmash: historical fiction, renaissance
• Tagmash: erotica, zombies
• Tagmash: french, philosophy, -existentialism, -postmodernism

That's the short version. But stop here and you'll never know what Zombie Listmania is!

(full post over at Thingology, "Tagmash: Book tagging grows up")